Reclaim the Streets, Reclaim the Code

An interview with Matthew Arnison of
Community Activist Technology and one of
Indymedia's original coders. By Madhava

"We've actually got the access to global communications now - easy access
because it's cheap - that the corporations and colonial governments have had
for centuries. Now it's in the hands of ordinary people and it's turning the
tables on globalization."

(First published in Punk Planet #43 May / June 2001: Special issue on
Indymedia and the history, culture, and technology of media activism. This
version seems a bit longer and rougher than what was printed.)

Matthew Arnison is one of the founding members of Community Activist
Technology, also known as Catalyst (or CAT). On their website (www.cat.org.au), they describe themselves as
"a Temporary Autonomous Zone created for the free exchange of information.
Low tech grass roots net access for real people. Pedestrians, public transport
and pushbikes on the information super hypeway."

CAT was one of the driving forces behind the success of the first Independent
Media Centre (IMC) in Seattle, November 1999. CAT's software enabled media
producers to publish their text, audio, photo, and video onto the first
Indymedia website and have it display on the frontpage in a matter of minutes.
This self-publishing system has now been implemented in all of the over 40 IMC
sites around the world, becoming the heart of the new movement for a democratic
media. In this interview, Matthew explains how the internet is empowering
activists and activating technologists. He also shares the story of the origin
of the technology behind indymedia.

Madhava: What does CAT do and how did you folks start up?

Arnison: We started out just trying to give dial-up e-mail access to
people in Australia, then the internet went commercial and we didn't need to do
that much so we got more and more into websites for community groups. Then
June 18, 1999 came up and it was a big global protest in lots of cities around
the world. This was kind of the first global day of action. Before that there
was a global Reclaim the Streets day but J18 (the moniker for the June 18th day
of protests) was much more about globalization explicitly. In Sydney, we
thought well, let's do a webcast. So
we wrote up some software that worked in all the ways that we thought were
important and that's all the things you see in indymedia. We wanted to have
the feel of things happening live, but at the same time we wanted it to be
stored, a live transmission is useless on the web because if you miss the thing
you can't see it.

There's quite a strong history of community media in it, that's where we're
coming from I guess, except it's the Internet instead of radio or television.
Many of us were involved in community television but the politics of it ended
up really messy and nasty and there were court cases and out of control
companies and all sorts of crap going on. We kind of all got a bit burned out
by that, that just turned a whole bunch of the original TV crew right off
getting involved in the community channel. So, some people just went off and
did different things, some people got into making video cassettes instead of
going on air and a few of us went and helped start up Catalyst or CAT. That was
about 5 or 6 years ago now.

How did CAT get involved with the Seattle WTO protests in 1999 and
with Indymedia?

What happened is that I'm doing a PhD in physics and I was in Colorado as part
of that, doing research at the university and I thought I'd check out the local
media activist scene. So one night I dropped in on Free Speech TV (a
progressive satellite television station and internet streaming media provider)
and I ran into Manse. Actually, through email from another Australian I found
out that Manse was involved in the Seattle thing, so I got onto him and said
"look, look, look, have you got any software to do the webcast for
this?" because I'd started hearing how big this event was gonna be and
the huge media center that they had planned and that it was gonna be multimedia
and all that sort of stuff. I was worried that they'd try and do the web page
manually because I'd seen a lot of people try to do that and it's just a
disaster generally because there's too much going on. So I talked to Manse and
they did actually have something but it was under [Microsoft] Windows and it
was still very early stages and this was 4 weeks before Seattle.

They were more thinking in terms of a newswire between organizations so that
people would put the media up and then other people would take the media down
and use it somewhere else, they weren't really thinking of it as a public page.
So I showed them our software and I said look, this is free software, you can
take it and you can use it. I can help you work on it. I'll be back in Sydney
but this is Linux so I can do all sorts of stuff over the net, whereas their
stuff was based on Windows so if they wanted to run with that they would have
been stuck with working on it themselves 'cause it's not very good for
long-distance stuff. They decided to go for it, so they got our cobbled
together messy code. We got the website up about 3 days before Seattle. Nobody
in Seattle knew beforehand how to use it or anything about it which was a bit
of a problem but it turned out pretty well.

How did you get the whole online self-publishing thing to work?
Were people receptive to the idea?

I was kind of confident that open publishing would work just because
it was just going to be too crazy trying to control it or edit it or filter
it. There was just no way that we were going to be able to keep up. The other
thing is that we just didn't have time to tell everyone about it. There was the
media center in Seattle with people streaming in and out all day, and then
there were different places within Seattle with people working on it. The
unexpected thing that came through was just all the stories we got from
individuals who'd been to the protests, been to the lock downs and stuff, who'd
come back home, checked out the website and just written up their story. It's
still making me tingle just thinking about it. You had people writing about
what they saw on Capital Hill that night when the police just rampaged through
a suburb, you had the video coming straight through of, I couldn't believe it,
these people with guns and teargas, sounds of explosions going off in the
streets. It sounded like a war zone from where I was in Sydney. It was good
luck really. We [in Sydney] were just one part, but to be able to plug in was
amazing.

Open publishing is a really big thing. People who are resistant to open
publishing say, "oh no we have to edit, we have to do this and do
that." I think that's the big challenge for us, to try to educate people
and explain that yes, actually you can trust people, that you will get a lot of
stories that you wouldn't get otherwise if you have open publishing because if
you trust people to judge whether their story is news worthy then you'll get
them trusting you in ways that they wouldn't otherwise. You'll get different
stories you wouldn't get if you had an edited filter system. And they're
exciting stories, they're amazing stories.

The example I usually give of that is from Washington DC at the International
Monetary Fund and World Bank protests (April 2000). One of the early protests
was against police brutality and the prison system. They had a permit but they
were marching along and the police just cordoned off the street and said you
can't go that way, you have to go this way. And the protestors did and it was a
trap. They turned the corner and of course they weren't legal anymore even
though the police had told them to go that way and the police surrounded this
block and picked everyone up, put them on busses and took them to prison. They
picked up the activists, they picked up the tourists, they picked up
journalists, and they picked up a consultant on his way to work at the World
Bank. So he spent about a day in prison and he couldn't contact his family to
let them know where he was. Then he got home and was quite shocked about the
whole experience. Somehow he must have found the indymedia site and he wrote
his story on there, that's how I found out about it.

Working with media activists around the world through Indymedia, in
particular people from the States, do you see differences in how people view
corporate media?

I don't know if this is something people are aware of in America but it's a
big thing here in Australia that people don't trust the media, despite the fact
that so many people watch it. I think they're just doing the cooking or
something and want something to watch. We're coming from completely the other
end of the spectrum. We assume we can trust people and then we work from
there. So maybe there's some things we have to do, like delete viruses or
whatever. And that also opens different styles of journalism up. So you might
have the straight traditional journalistic style, you might have the passionate
rant, the personal story, you've all these different ways of telling stories.
You've got the direct feedback with the comment system, you've got people
reusing other people's stories. And if you've got copyleft that sort of forces
the ability to do that. So I've actually seen stories on indymedia where
someone has taken a previous story and then remixed it and turned it into a new
story. This was a sound piece. So I definitely think there is a different way
of doing journalism that's actually different than a lot of community media,
community radio and community television. For some reason they got locked into
this mode where they try to emulate the traditional media. You'd have your
alternative news show but it'd still use a lot of the styles and techniques of
the mainstream news show. Basically these people were in training for
professional jobs. And that's where we can break the whole system down because
we're not trying to have paid employees, we're not trying to have jobs. It's
just volunteer based and hopefully it will always be volunteer based.

This sentiment of using a volunteer base to offer an alternative
seems to mirror your thinking behind the technology involved with Indymedia.
Can you talk a little about that?

One of the reasons that the internet is such a strong activist force I
think is that it's built on free software. People who might be working for the
government or for a university or just volunteering their time donate their
code to the public through something called a copyleft which basically uses the
copyright law to enforce the fact that you must share the code. If you use it
or change it, you have to then share it again. The code can be copied freely
but anyone who copies it must then, if they make any changes and give it to
someone else, share the original source code, the raw material so that the next
person can change it again. That's the genius of free software, reclaiming
public code, but using the copyright laws to do it.

So, that's why the internet is so strong. It's built on this incredibly
reliable free software because there's this whole free software ethic that ties
in with the decentralization and the freedom from censorship and editors. In
the last ten years we've also seen the rise of Linux on top of the free
software that runs the Internet and that's such a powerful thing that it's
giving Microsoft a lot of trouble. They're really starting to hurt now from
free software. This is the biggest corporation in the world running scared
from tens of thousands of volunteers. It's a pretty amazing thing and I
actually think that's one the biggest successes of the nineties; taking the
power away from Microsoft with just with a bunch of activists and software
hackers.

We haven't seen the end of the fight yet of course, we've got the MPAA [the
Motion Picture Association of America is currently suing the hacker website
2600.com for publishing some code written by a young boy in Scandinavia that
allows people to watch DVD movies they have purchased on Linux computers] and
the record companies of America fighting the same battle, but I think they're
in a really tough spot.

What do you say to those who claim that the Internet actually has
a centralizing effect considering that it is disproportionately used by
large corporations that already have lots of power?

I reckon that's garbage. The thing is that people look at the internet and
they look at the 100% hype which says it's totally free from censorship,
totally free from corporate control, routes around censorship, all of these
things. That is an ideal and it's not matched by reality. But at the same time
the same people who criticize the internet for all these ways that it doesn't
live up 100% to the ideal, sometimes they forget to look at what we had before
the internet which is radio and television. When you look at radio and
television it's just a joke. You have Pacifica which was meant to be a
community group completely get overtaken by corporate interests, the television
is all coming through about half a dozen American media companies. Whether
you're living in the U.S. or living in Australia, or living in Bangladesh
you're international news is probably going through an American or maybe
European newswire service and that's all based around the stock market, it's
got nothing to do with what actual people want to know, it's just a side effect
of financial news. So if you look at radio and television it's ridiculously
centralized. You have one transmitter or five transmitters for 4 million
people in Sydney. So I don't think it makes sense to that the internet is
centralizing things. It's obviously decentralizing things. In Sydney there
would be tens of thousands of people with their own websites and they've got
total control over what goes up on those websites.

A sort of cute analogy I thought of the other day is the whole idea of the
global village that we got with international satellite TV in the 60's and
70's. I don't think we really had a global village, I think what we had was a
very small group of rich boys with big megaphones telling the village what the
rest of the village thought. Now with the internet you've got the opportunity
to bump into people on the street and have a chat with them, you don't have to
be anyone special to have a two way conversation and we've actually got that
access to global communications now, that easy access because it's cheap, that
the corporations and colonial governments have had for centuries. Now
it's in the hands of ordinary people and it's turning the tables on
globalization. Finally people have some global sense of what's going on,
rather than just governments and corporations.

Copyright status: uncertain. I'm trying to contact Madhava - he owns the
copyright. Meanwhile I'm assuming the standard indymedia license: free for
non-profit re-use. At the time of the interview, Madhava was a volunteer with
the New York City Indymedia collective.